Of course, the new challenge was to mount such a lens on a standard 35 mm film camera. The lens in question, as one might imagine, was much larger than the lenses normally used for film production, and getting the light to rest on the film strip required adjustment. The cameras had to be rebuilt to get the lenses closer to the actual moving film line, and a new type of camera rotating shutter had to be created essentially from scratch. Once that camera was built, however, shooting “Barry Linden” became easy. As Kubrick explains, many old technical problems have been overcome:
“There was still a lot of work to be done to make it usable for him and the camera. For one thing, the back of the lens had to be 2.5mm away from the film plane, which required a special adjustment on the rotating camera shutter. But with this lens it was now too dim to read in low light conditions.” For daytime interior scenes, we used actual daylight from the windows, or diffused daylight outside the window with bank lights, with tracing paper taped to the glass.
With nothing but natural light entering the camera and only lights scattered through the windows, Kubrick never worried about accidentally shooting directly into a light source. With such a camera, the lens flare looks something similar to the actual iris adjustment of the human eye, and the camera never looks artificially blown.
The room may have dimmed to interfere with reading, but the film image was now clearer than ever.
